User blog:Megamangohan/A World Without Grace Undertale game plan
NOTE: THIS BLOG POST IS A WORK IN PROGRESS If my work has not been able to tell you anything, you should have been able to tell that I am a HUGE fan of crossovers. I believe they are a way for verses with different or similar beliefs to interact and communicate with each other. While it is very true that many characters within the verse have many different thoughts of what life is about in general, the verse itself tries to teach an overall perspective to the reader/listener that best summarizes what the verse is about. Take a look Dragonball is a verse about always overcoming your previous limits, for the case of achieving new hights. Megaman is all about the purpose of a free will, and to not make sure that granted free will falls you into a radical thinking pattern, such as various robot masters wanting to have a machine-only universe, or Copy X taking the other extreme, destroying all robots for the sake of protecting humans. Shin Megami Tensai is a "pick your posion" verse, allowing you to choose whichever path you want, but being forced to accept that whichever route you take will have drastic negative consequences. Now not ALL verses are like this. Some verses could be a plain good vs evil, with the main strategy being something outside of some "philosopical element," such as the stratigies behind how each character achieves their motives. As of right now, I am currently invested in those verses that do hold these "philosophical elements," as a way of massivly spicing out their verse. As a person, I will say that I have not expanded my horizions nearly to the degree I cold have or should have. But if there is one thing I have played, and a game that caters more to defending its beliefs than any other game I visited in the market so far, it's undertale, a game made by Toby Fox. The next question is, why exactly would I want to look at verse, what am I planning to do with the information I have recieved from it? I don't want my knoweldge on the verse to go to waste. As such, I want to give an entire arc of my verse, crossing over the undertale characters of my verse with the characters seen in Undertale. I have played and analyzed the details put into the work of Undertale, and I have noticed a massivly sharp contrast between the beliefs my story from an overall perspective hold, and the overall perspective Undertale holds. I must say, Undertale does do a great job enforcing every single one of it's believes on you. A comparision between the two games would alone be enough to get you, the reader of this blog post, a massive understanding of where both sides come from, but I bet a crossover will do even better. One more disclaimer: THE INFORMATION PRESENTED HERE IS NOT EXACTLY PERFECT, If you see a mistake between the representation of undertale portrayed here and Toby Fox's actual interpretation, please tell me in the comments below. When originally creating A World Without Grace, I intended the entire part 1 of Guiomar's story, (which can be seen in another blog post,) to be a platformer game with a large story and large amount of dialouge represented into it's narrative. Without going into the core astects of Undertale, we have already seen a difference. A World Without Grace (At least the way I intended the game to think) was intended to be a platformer, linear game, while Undertale, (not exactly) is an open ended RPG game. Before breaking down the two games more, let's look at Toboy Fox's intention of creating Undertale. Toby Fox always saw traditional RPG games as killing fests, a place where people slaughtered thousands of monsters for the sake of becoming stronger. Toby Fox wanted to create a game where an alternative pathway to violence was POSSIBLE (pay attention to this word, as I will be using it a lot,) and to scorn the player for choosing paths of violence. Within this small sentence, we see many things Toby Fox wants to teach in his game. Modernism- The rejection of how things worked in the past and the acceptance of how things will now change in the future. In other words, rejest tradition because we have evolved. Possibilities- Simply the fact that multiple options are given to a player, rather than traditionally, simply the story that is given to the player. Perfection- Unlike traditional games (I'm looking at you Megami Tensai) every option you make means something, there are clearly choises that will lead down "the wrong path," and there are clearly choises that will "lead down the right path." This is in sharp contrasts to traditional games that allow you to shape the world towards however you see fit, and than that way being "the right one." Breaking the Forth wall- Traditionally, games do not acknoweldge the real world because the game developers want you to be immersed into their world as you were playing a character who is part of the story. Now you ARE the story (At least the main character, more on this later,) and the game of Undertale is now a "bridge of existence" from the game's world to the real world. Consequences - '''Now that the game touches the really real you by means of successfully breaking the forth wall, the game can now put YOU in charge of your own actions within the game.... or at least it wants to. Undertale can never touch you, regardless of how many times characters within the game will try and close the game down. Undertale compensates for this flaw by making sure all Consequences are in game. While even Traditional RPG's will have consequences in game (I'm looking at you Chrono Trigger). Undertale goes a step further by enforcing these consequences VIA means of irreversiblity. (As in you can't take back your actions once they are committed.) Forgiveness - ironically, while you are expected to be perfect, that would also mean you would be required to accept that other people will bring pain to you. you are expected to let go of that pain, but nothing much else is known from that point. there is still one more question to this. If Toby Fox wants to punish us for going on these supposed genocidal rampages, than this would mean that unless Toby Fox were trying to be a jerk, you are being punished for supposedly doing something bad. Now let's take a look at where this idea starts. "Within the beginning of the game, you figure out that there exists a war between humans and monsters. Later in the story you find out the humans purposed the monsters as a threat, they were afraid of the monsters and decided to banish them into the land so the humans were finally able to protect themselves. The monsters however, did not like the land they were banished to, and the king of all the monsters, named Asgore, decided to put revenge on the monsters, swearing to kill any human who tries to come into the underground as an act of first vengeance, and then seeking the power to 'destroy all humanity." This story sounds oddly similar to the way God banished Satan in not only the book of the bible, but also the world without Grace story-line (Part 1). But there is a twist, that being that the monsters are trying to be seen as far more innocent in this story-line. Some might even go as far as saying their desire to destroy all of humanity for what they did is justified, and that they were only doing it as the only way they thought of to free monster-kind. This interpretation makes sense. Already we get our shot at seeing that there are two sides going against each other, One side in everything to benefit the monsters, and destroy the humans, the other, the exact opposite. Then there is "You," a child who has steeped foot in this world on complete accident and is unable to get out unless meeting certain conditions. You get introduced to a dark flower with this seemingly dark philosophy "kill or be killed" and through parts of the flowey introduction and the Toriel introduction, you are introduced to the options of choosing to kill monsters or not to kill monsters on your quest to escape. You would psychologically think your goal would be to get through the game without killing everyone, but then you meet Toriel once again who stops you from doing one goal, and seemingly it seems the only way to get towards the goal of escaping is by means of disobeying the other goal of not killing everyone. You decide to kill her and Flowey praises you for following the rules of "kill or be killed." There is a lot to analyze here. First, there is the knowledge that Toriel left the stronger portion of the underground to get to higher grounds. This is for the purpose of protecting the humans from the dangers that exist within monster kind. It is clear in this case that she finds humans under the purpose of being treated as well with the sole purpose of protecting humans. This means she is on the side of protecting the humans. But by you choosing to kill her, that leads to the question of what side you are even on. It is even possible that you are in a different side completely. On top of this, you aren't even notified any true goal in escaping. The only motive you have for escaping is so you can finally see your friends and family once again. That is definitely not a good motive for even killing a single monster, unless the life of the monsters had no value to begin with. The game makes clear that getting out is somehow an important goal, but never fills in the spot. Thankfully, Guiomar is able to fill this role with his own path and "very important reason" to save the humans. For sake of simplicity, we will make this the salvation of humans is required, from an extreme destruction they are about to achieve. If any monster hears this, They will immediately think he is referring to the human race they faced in their world that locked them up in the underground, creating tensions between the two races. Then there comes flowey. He constantly talks about the "rule," and how "killing" is it's own rule. Let's Define a rule Rule: strip of wood or other rigid material used for measuring length or marking straight lines No, the other definition Rule: one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. The key word here is that a rule is defined as a principle, a regulation that must be followed no matter what. A rule when imposed by an authority is usually meant for the ultimate protection and happiness of you. The question then becomes who is enforcing this rule. It certainly can't be flowey, since you have the option to listen to him without him punishing you (sort of,) and It can't be Toriel since she is telling you to do the exact opposite, the only answer left is nothing but your own limitations. In other words, you have to kill or get killed since you are too limited as a human being to do both, you are forced to chose one over the other, this is understandable, it also explains how you chose the killing to achieve the greater good. With this rule of understanding, the game gives you three paths after all this is done. These routes being Pacifist, Neutral, and Genocide, based on how many monsters you kill to get out. It is a safe bet to assume that one would commit towards a neutral route with no knowledge of the game first. You also get one more ability, the RESET Ability. You use this ability to constantly get better at your runs each turn. This reaches to the point where you, as the player, realize that you have no need to kill monsters to get out of the underground, essentially accomplishing both of your goals without sacrificing one for the other. You even figure out that your name wasn't the one you had at the beginning of the game.It is also safe to say that in the real world, being perfect is impossible, but due to the new abilities you receive, such as RESET, and DETERMINATION, you are finally able to. I also believe that is why the true protagonist is Frisk instead of you, because you are unable to and would never anyway commit to something as powerful as a pacifist route. I also believe this is why the game as a whole portrays the character as young. This is a representation of the character having no experience, where as you do, being both the real world experience of being forced to choose between "lesser of two evils," in many decisions, as well as you choosing to do whatever you want in a fictional world because the world is only fiction. Then there is the Genocide route In this route, You kill everyone. The game tries to convince you that you have absolutely no reason for doing what you are doing in this route, only to then claim that you did it "to see what happens, and for power." It is true that when some people get board of something, they can and will find new ways to have fun with the route they are playing on, even if it eventually means killing everyone, just like flowey. However, I can think of four reasons why one would choose to pursue this route otherwise. The first reason is because it's just a game. The second reason is self defense. The game tries to debunk this case by giving you as a person many opportunities to not go the route this reason, but it fails. The reason why is if a person chooses to kill, it may be because he knows that killing will only lead for more chances of mercy, thus inclining him to kill for those extra opportunities, and in doing so, avoids the chance of him getting into a "real fight" where the chances of him being killed are much higher. The third reason is Justice. Maybe the person did have experience from the humans of the monsters being bad, and wanted to seek vengeance for how the monsters "hurt" the humans, and he wanted to kill them back. This is with the only two reasons he chose to still kill them, even when they asked for mercy being a lack of trust, and/or unforgiveness. The last reason being because they could. The most bizarre choice for seeking this route, they may have wanted to avoid being a prideful person, and saw justification in sin as a means to avoid pride. In the name of the LAW, this means you are killing due to the LAW of limited strength, the opposite of pride. One more thing, There was also an indication in the genocide route that if you are after the Genocide route, you could be out to kill both humans and monsters, but it fails to provide a reason why. This is also a reason concerning where I am seeing a missing route. This statement assumes Justice cannot be a route where the monsters are trying to be killed in the name of vengeance, but not the humans. This should also be a considered route. No Matter What route you choose, you fall into one of four people. 1. Help The Humans, and the Oppressed Monsters (Pacifist) (Chaotic) (Anarchy) (libertarian) 2. Help the Oppressed monsters, but not the humans (Neautral) (Liberal) 3. Help the Humans, but not the monsters. (conservative) (neutral) 4. Help no one (Lawful) (Genocide) (Statist) Note: The concept of Pride could apply to any choice of Spectrum. Same with Humility. I'm not done yet, later, I will compare the "Undertale" Model with both the political and Religious Model. '''NOTE: THIS BLOG POST IS A WORK IN PROGRESS Category:Blog posts